by Dale Bailey
“Why?” he asked. “Why did you have to die?”
People die, that’s all. They just die.
“But I’m frightened …”
Henry turned. He could barely see his father through the dark and snow. His legs felt like water underneath him. He said, “I’ve always been afraid—”
He felt that touch, urging him on. Snow blew and wind raged and still they walked. Ahead, the courthouse loomed above the arc of the Stone Bridge. And then they were on the bridge, Cinder Bottom falling away beneath them, the wind pouring down from the hills. Cold, so cold. He felt exposed here, no shadows to flee to, no place to run.
“You have to help me,” he pleaded.
The mysteries are locked inside yourself.
“The dreams …”
They were over the bridge, High Street angling up to the courthouse square. His father took him by the shoulders, his eyes commanding. In his mind, Henry stood before a mirror, touching on his face the spots of inflammation, like burns, the imprints of a dead man’s fingers.
To stop the dreams, you have to understand yourself.
Henry recoiled, wanting to pull away from the presence who walked beside him. Yet he could not. Slowly they climbed the hill. Something tugged at his elbow. He stumbled back, crouching in the black mouth of the alley as a sheriff’s Blazer cruised slowly by, chains gnawing at the icy street.
“I’m afraid—”
Look inside yourself. Dreams are symbols. Symbols are real. Metaphors are true, Henry. Remember.
Then the courthouse square, the blank storefront windows. He stumbled. He was on his knees in the snow; he didn’t remember how he got there. He forced himself to his feet, then staggered into a recess between buildings.
He saw a door. Then he was climbing the dim stairwell inside, reeling with dizziness, the presence at his elbow steadying him. At the top of the stairs they paused before a door. He collapsed against it, hammering his fist against the flimsy panel. And then he stopped and only leaned there, weeping.
To stop the dreams you have to understand yourself.
Henry turned his head to look at his father—his father, lost to him for all these years—and he felt well up within him all the mixed emotions, the thousand ambivalences he had felt for as long as he could remember. The hatred and the love and the bone-deep suspicion. The manifold regrets. The grief. Oh yes, the grief.
He heard the sound of a dead bolt being drawn back on the other side of the door.
Henry gazed at his father and wept. Quincy Sleep looked as he had looked always, heavy and thick-muscled as a lumberjack in his faded jeans, his flannel shirt rolled back to reveal the intricate corkscrews of dark hair on his arms. And then he wasn’t there at all. In the faint radiance of the bare bulb dangling overhead, the banister and the newel post printed their shadows upon the wall, with all the stairs descending.
“Please,” he whispered.
Henry felt the door shudder underneath his weight, opening inward. And then, having lost the strength to stand, he was falling. Falling and falling and uttering these words aloud—“Father, Father”—into Benjamin Strange’s sleepy and affrighted face.
Sauls Run
The Present
Chapter 21
For Del Grubb, the storm and its immediate aftermath were an exercise in frustration.
There had been a bit of pleasure at first, to be sure, but he had rushed the business with Asa Cade. He had been locked inside Harold Crawford’s mind for too long, listening to that old siren song of rage. Once or twice over the years, he had managed to wrest control from his alternate self—the incident with the young man from the rest stop sprang to mind—but those occasions had merely sharpened his hunger. Nothing allayed it, not even his protracted chat with Quincy Sleep. Sleep had been planning to go public—a move that would have deprived Grubb of the vengeance he craved—and silencing him had been a sweet job, but the hunger had been gnawing at Grubb through all those years locked in the prison of Harold Crawford’s mind, and it would not be sated. Well, now he was free—free for good, he could feel it—and it was Harold Crawford pissing and moaning down there in the dark. That was fine with Del Grubb. Just fine.
There had been a bad moment in the courthouse men’s room. Looking up from the sink, his nostrils wrinkling with the ammonia stench of urine—
—Christ didn’t anyone clean this place—
—he had caught a glimpse of his own face staring back at him—his first true moment of self-appraisal in years. The fat, graying man inside the glass looked nothing like the Del Grubb of old, sculpted and hard, with the cold eyes and prominent bone structure of an Aryan king. Only the eyes remained unchanged, and that brought it all home to him.
Twenty-four years, that’s what he’d lost.
Twenty-four years with Harold Crawford at the wheel. A weak sister, Delbert Grubb’s father would have called this middle-aged sack of shit. Dear old Dad, master of the Book and the Fist, generous in applications of them both. His father had made him sculpted and hard, and at that moment, looking into the rust-stained mirror at the weak sister he had become, Grubb felt the brunt of his father’s shame.
His hand lashed out before he even thought it through. Shards of glass rained musically into the porcelain basin. He was lucky he hadn’t gashed himself badly. He sucked at a bright droplet of blood welling up from a shallow cut in the heel of his palm, thinking, Be cool.
The end game had started, but it wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.
Which reminded him: He had a few loose ends to wrap up.
Back to the main office for a word with Abby—oh, he was cool—and then he was settling behind the wheel of a Blazer in the Public Works garage. Free. He could feel it inside him, that freedom, spreading black and bountiful wings as he took the Blazer out from under the courthouse and into the snow just starting to spin from the forbidding sky. The snow was a good thing, he remembered thinking as he turned the Blazer east, toward Asa Cade’s. If the Run got half the snow the National Weather Service was calling for, it would shut down everything for a week. No one would stumble across his handiwork for days. He was looking forward to it, that little bit of work.
He had planned on a little fun with Cindy Cade, a little of the old slap and tickle, and who cared if she was sixty years old? It had been twenty-four long years, she was plump and juicy as a roasting hen, and a man needed a warm hole to poke it in every now and again. Sometimes, the old five-fingered discount just wouldn’t do. Unfortunately, it had gone badly from the first.
Grubb should have seen it coming, should have had a better sense of the kind of terror Asa Cade must have been feeling after Quincy Sleep’s little accident. But Harold Crawford had softened up more than Grubb’s gut. He’d softened up his instincts, too. They ambled down the hall to Cade’s office, he and Asa and Cindy Cade, and Grubb had just started in on his questions—he had a million of them—when Cade had dodged into the bedroom. Said he needed to visit the john, but Grubb never believed that—though Asa Cade did look like a man about to shit his pants. Everything had gone to hell in the next few seconds. Asa had gone for the gun and Cindy Cade had got between them somehow. She took three bullets in the clamorous instants before he got to Cade, the gun hot and smoking in his hand.
A botched job for sure.
Afterward, Grubb had stared longingly at Cindy Cade’s body, his cock as stiff as a crowbar in his pants, but that was all he had done. He wasn’t some kind of pervert who liked to fuck dead women—not as a habit anyway—nor had he come in his pants like Harold Crawford. No, he liked them live and squirming underneath him.
He’d been more careful with Raymond Ostrowski. He found him dead drunk, passed out before the television in a ragged easy chair with a bottle of Turkey in his hand. He had a gun, too, and Grubb took a moment of special pleasure in waking up the fat little fuck and giving him a chance to dry fire it two or three times before he realized the damn thing had been unloaded while he dozed. Then Grubb had taken
out his own gun—but he hadn’t fired it. No, he’d just swung it around and cracked Ostrowski square on the head with its heavy butt. The next time Ostrowski woke up, he had sobered considerably. It was too late by then. Old Ray had had a bit of a run-in with a roll of duct tape, and he wasn’t going anywhere at all.
They were outside, back in the shelter of the woods, back by the dog run. It didn’t take Ostrowski but a minute or two to figure out what Grubb had in mind. He blubbered like a baby while Grubb finished off the job he’d started the last time he’d come around, picking off the remaining dogs one by one. Bang bang bang bang bang bang, six shots batting away through the snow. The dogs had remembered him, too. They retreated to the corners of the chain-link enclosure, their eyes rolling with terror, but there was nowhere to hide. Grubb had gut-shot the last one, and they sat out there in the snow and dark for a long time, listening to it die.
Old Ray blubbered the whole time, and Del Grubb had laughed to hear it. Yes, indeed, a good time had been had by all. And he was only getting rolling, too.
In the end, Ostrowski forgot all about his dogs. It just took a closer acquaintance with Del Grubb’s knife to help him put them out of his mind for good. The knife also seemed to improve his memory, and when Grubb learned about the little trick Perry Holland had pulled, he felt a slow burn of anger. He’d have to take care of that small oversight, too, before things were over. But first things first—and Raymond Ostrowski was the matter at hand. They’d spent a pleasant hour or two together, he and Ray and his trusty six inches of steel, and if Grubb might have felt a little spasm in his groin along the way, well, even a strong man had an occasional moment of weakness, right? Twenty-four years was a long time, after all. A very long time.
Grubb only regretted he had to rush it there at the end. But the snow had kept coming down and down, and duty called. So he’d finished up and headed back to town, slipping into the mask of Harold Crawford as easily as a politician slipping on his campaign smile. But it had really been Delbert Grubb all along, taking care of the thousand and one tasks a sheriff had to see to in the middle of a small-town blizzard. Delbert Grubb, hungry and waiting.
It was after midnight before he could manage to slip away again. When he had gotten up to Widow’s Ridge, Quincy Sleep’s house was empty and dark. For a moment, he feared that Sleep had slipped off just as Crawford had warned him to, but a brief investigation suggested otherwise. If he had gone, he had done so without taking his clothes. He’d probably just holed up somewhere during the storm, and that meant he would turn up eventually. All Grubb had to do was keep his eye peeled and wait for the weather to break. As soon as Perry finished clearing that tunnel—a few days at most—Grubb had some plans for the thing under the hill. The end game.
After that, nothing much would matter at all.
In the meantime, Grubb had to play-act at being Harold Crawford, see to his business, be cool. And that was what he did, too. He spent the next couple of days hauling stranded motorists out of ditches, monitoring highway conditions, and seeing that housebound folks got something to eat. And he did it all with a smile on his face; after all, his was an elected office, even if he never planned to run again, and old habits died hard. Inwardly, though, he chafed—at the continuing absence of Sleep; at the delay the snow would cause Perry Holland’s crew; most of all, at the frustrated hunger welling up inside him.
It would be a good death, that last one. He longed for its consummation. In the meantime, he kept silent. He made his official rounds. He stayed cool.
But the waiting was hard.
Benjamin Strange spent the days of the storm waiting, as well. The boy—for so he thought of him, he couldn’t help it—had given him a scare, stumbling in out of the snow like that. A scare, and more than a little food for thought, for in stripping away Henry Sleep’s ice-encased coat, his hands had found the folded yellow notes that had belonged to Quincy Sleep and something else, too. The gun.
Ben had never liked guns, and he didn’t care for this one either, a black short-barreled revolver made by Smith & Wesson. Loaded, too, though it didn’t smell as though it had been fired. With trembling fingers he unloaded it and set it aside.
Then he tended to the boy. He finished undressing him, wrestled him into a warm tub to bring his body temperature up, put him to bed. A long welt had risen on the boy’s head, and the skin around it gleamed with dull purple bruise, but he couldn’t find any other injuries. The head worried him, though. Ben knew just enough about concussions to know he should get Henry to a hospital.
But the matter of the gun kept him from doing so. That and a memory of Harold Crawford that kept coming back to him. After Quincy Sleep had killed himself—if he had killed himself, and Ben didn’t think he had—Crawford had paid him a visit, using that hogwash about phone records as an excuse. And what Ben remembered most about that interview was the light in Crawford’s eyes. Curiosity, he had supposed, and then, as the interview—interrogation was really a better word, wasn’t it?—veered oddly off course, he had thought it might be anger.
Standing to go, Crawford had wheeled around to face him. “You’ll want to call me, you hear anything else about this,” he said. He tapped his hat against one fleshy thigh and held Ben’s gaze, that strange light flaring up in his eyes. In that moment, another thought arced like a comet through the night sky of Ben’s mind: that it was nothing at all, that light, that for a single unnerving moment he had been staring into a hollow pit at the center of Harold Crawford’s soul. Crawford had smiled then, thanking him for his time, and that bleak light had winked out as suddenly as it had sprung to life. Watching it go away was like watching someone put on a mask.
Now, remembering, Ben thought: No, it wouldn’t do to get Henry admitted to the hospital. Not until he figured out what had happened, why he had the gun.
Instead, he smoked and kept watch by the bedside. Occasionally, he coughed, expelling a thin pink froth into the towel he held to his weathered face. He was dying. He could feel it in his chest, every breath a battle with the enemy in his lungs. He found himself thinking about the odd cycle Quincy Sleep had discovered. Ben found himself trying to believe it, trying to convince himself he could count upon it to save him. If he could only weather these strange dark months, he wondered, would the wheel turn once again? Would the cancer go into remission?
Ben suspected he’d never have the chance to find out. The sickness was coming on faster now, too fast, and he couldn’t help thinking of Henry’s mother. The cycle had turned then, too; but it had turned too late for Lily Sleep. She had died anyway. Ben thought about death, like falling down and down into the dark forever, and he shivered.
He wished he believed in God.
Toward morning, Henry grew feverish. Ben leaned closer, anxious to snatch something from the ravings. All he got was names—Emily and Asa, Cindy—but he recognized two of them, the Cades, right off. It was seven o’clock by then. A pale, overcast dawn glowed outside the window, the sky still filled with snow.
Ben found Asa Cade’s home number in the directory and punched the number into the keypad. He counted the rings, an even twenty-five of them, before he cradled the phone. Somebody should be there, he thought. A morning like this one, somebody ought to be there. He stared at the gun, lying on the nightstand with the contents of Henry’s pockets—the folded packet of notes, a wallet, a handful of loose change. But it was the gun that drew his eyes. His mind locked on it somehow, summoning up the phone call to Asa Cade, those twenty-five rings.
He’d never felt so old or so afraid.
The boy moaned in his sleep.
Ben sat heavily. Flipping open the wallet, he thumbed through the usual detritus—a five and three crumpled ones, a North Carolina driver’s license, credit cards, photos. The photos gave him pause: Quincy Sleep, broad-shouldered and smiling in his clerical robes; a faded snapshot of a tired-looking woman with a ten- or twelve-year-old kid he took to be Henry; the senior photo of a high school girl, posed and ill at ease.
He slipped the photo from its sleeve and studied the girl more closely. With her dark, shoulder-length hair and frank, watchful eyes, she possessed a kind of second-glance beauty, the kind of good looks most people pass right over. He liked Henry better for having the good sense to notice her. He flipped the photo over and read the inscription with a little shock of recognition: EMILY WOOD, 1986.
Nothing more.
He glanced at Henry, sleeping restlessly, then back to the photo, then to the gun. He felt a prickle of unease at the back of his neck. Twenty-five rings, he thought. What the hell?
He reached for the telephone book and thumbed it open. Wolford, Womac, Womac, Wood. He stared at the number for a long time and then he picked up the telephone, resolved to count rings again. But someone picked it up right away.
“Miss Wood?” he said. “Emily Wood?”
“Yes.”
The voice sounded old and weary, edged with tears, and he thought, It’s someone else; she wouldn’t be that old. But he said, “My name is Benjamin Strange. Do you know Henry Sleep, Miss Wood?”
She was silent for so long that he thought they might have been disconnected. And when she spoke again, there was a depth in her voice that said she was more than a friend. “Is he okay?”
“Can you come?” he asked.
Henry dreamed he stood on the frost-heaved hardpan of a ruined street. As far as he could see—to the rim of jagged mountains, like dragon’s teeth—lay only the bombed-out shells of houses, blackened walls, basements like dark mouths in the earth.
On a rocky promontory over waters oily black, Holland House had fallen into decay. Opposite, the squarish bulk of the courthouse loomed up, like the last rotten molar thrust through a diseased gum. Between them, nothing at all. Only gutted houses, ashen ruins, as though a great conflagration had burned here. A bloated moon shed its cancerous radiance across the debris. Wind harried gray stratus across the midnight sky.